World Hope Forum ENGLAND
REGENERATION
Curated by Sass Brown, WHF Ambassador for England
Welcome, Philip Fimmano and Li Edelkoort
Sass Brown – Craft as a vehicle for change
By Walid – Upcycling precious textiles
Orsola de Castro – Loved Clothes Last
Kresse Welsing – Devalued materials
Alan Brown – Slow craft
Tatreez collective – Diasporic textile culture
Suzanne Lee – Designing With Biology
Bel Jacobs – Climate change
Helen Story - UNHCR Designer in Residence
“Through this bricolage of makers, doers, thinkers, speakers, activists, designers, innovators, and artists, I wanted to honour a diaspora of experience, to demonstrate the power of identity, collaboration, and hope."
SPEAKERS
Dr. Sass Brown MPS, PhD
Course Leader Sustainable Fashion: Business & Practices MA, Kingston University London
WHF Ambassador for England
Previously the Founding Dean of the Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation, Sass Brown is the Course Leader for Kingston University London’s MA in Sustainable Fashion: Business and Practices. Brown completed her Ph.D. in January 2021 on Global Artisanship and Models of Sustainable Development. Prior to joining DIDI, Sass was the Interim Dean for the Fashion Institute of Technology's School of Art and Design in New York, where she oversaw the management of 17 design departments. As a researcher, writer, and educator, Brown's area of expertise is ethical fashion in all its forms from slow design and heritage craft skills to recycling, reuse, alternative business models, and ethical practices. Her publications include the books Eco Fashion and ReFashioned for British publishers Laurence King.
Kresse Wesling
Co-Founder, Elvis & Kresse and Co-Farmer, New Barns Farm
Kresse is a multi-award-winning environmental entrepreneur and Young Global Leader with a background in venture capital and significant start-up experience. After first meeting with the London Fire Brigade in 2005, Kresse launched Elvis & Kresse, which turns industrial waste into innovative lifestyle products and returns 50% of profits to charities related to the waste. Elvis & Kresse’s first line is made from decommissioned fire hoses, 50% of the profits from this line are donated to the Fire Fighters Charity. The company now collects 12 different waste streams, has several charitable partnerships, and is involved with collaborations across industries, including most recently a five-year partnership with the Burberry Foundation.
Bel Jacobs
Climate Activist
Bel Jacobs is a former fashion editor turned speaker, writer and campaigner on climate justice, animal rights and alternative systems in fashion. She is founder of Fashion in Schools, speaking to secondary school pupils about the impact of the fashion industry and different ways to engage creatively with fashion; co-founder of Extinction Rebellion Fashion Action as well as Fashion Act Now, a campaign group calling for a managed contraction of the fashion industry. She is founder of The Empathy Project, an online platform seeking to heal the broken relationship between humans and animals as a key tenet of the transition to a more evolved future. Finally, she is co-founder of The Islington Climate Centre, a hub for social and environmental groups in North London.
www.theempathyproject.co.uk www.islingtonclimatecentre.co.uk
Professor Helen Storey
Professor of Fashion and Science at London College of Fashion, University of The Arts, London, MBE, FRSA RDI
Helen Storey has been pioneering her work for over 30 years and has brought the worlds of art and science together, producing hybrid projects and products that have broken new and award-winning ground. These include Wonderland, Catalytic Clothing, Plastic is Precious , Dress of Glass and Flame, Dress For Our Time. A social Artist, whose career began in the Fashion Industry in 1983; since 2016, she has been working between Jordan and London - In 2019, she was appointed the first UNHCR ‘Designer in Residence’ at Za’atari Refugee Camp, where she has co created 15 projects to better life, whilst bringing back gifted knowledge from refugees and NGO’s into the teaching and learning experience at her University. In 2022, her work, together with UNHCR, has extended to 4 African countries.
Walid Damirji
British-Iraqi Fashion Designer
There are too few personalities in fashion that bring that gorgeous old school chic to style nowadays, but British-Iraqi designer Walid Damirji is one of them. While others may strive for maximum exposure and the fast burn of celebrity, Walid – with his characteristic hand-worked ‘By Walid’ label and one-of-a-kind ethos knows every one of his ‘looks’ and can talk about items of his clothing like old friends. These are, if you like, anonymous heirlooms from history, modernised and reinterpreted by Walid. Travelling the world, collecting materials like an anthropologist gathers evidence of wild and wonderful things, he assembles his medley of rococo silks, belle epoque passementerie, box upon box of Whitby jet, ancient cashmeres, workwear, school - boy twills, 1920s linens, frothing reams of lace, recycled furs, 18th century ecclesiastical embroideries and Chinoiserie Spanish shawls.
By Walid is not for the person who wants to remain anonymous. But then; what good fashion is? His signature is distinctive and it is beloved by men and women of fashion; what he calls affectionately his ‘movers and shakers’. Because what Walid has done is to recreate the bond that used to exist between a customer and a designer, dressmaker or tailor. It is the opposite of anonymity and it is completely modern and contemporary because not only is the relationship between maker and customer implicitly; he is, quite simply, in the vanguard of responsible fashion. In a time when disposable seasonal fashions ask to be replaced every few months, Walid’s one of a kind separates improve with age – the provenance of their cloth is prepared to absorb a new story. These are clothes that speak of craft, of history and of quality. It is the kind of luxury that sometimes money cannot buy.
Orsola de Castro
Mentor, Curator & Author
Orsola de Castro is an opinion leader in sustainable fashion, a mentor, curator, and author. Her multi-award-winning brand From Somewhere (1997 - 2014) was pioneering in the field of upcycling and sold in some of the world’s best boutiques - collaborations include collections for Tesco Clothing, Robe Di Kappa, Topshop, and Speedo.
In 2006 she started Estethica, the highly acclaimed Sustainable Fashion Showcase at London Fashion Week (which she has recently reformed), and in 2013 she co-founded Fashion Revolution, now the world’s largest fashion activism movement, with teams in over 80 countries. She is a regular lecturer at Central Saint Martins BA and MA, Associate Visiting Professor for the faculty of the Arts at Middlesex University and Visiting Lecturer on the Distance Learning MSc Humanitarian Intervention at the University of East London (School of Psychology). Her first book, Loved Clothes Last was published by Penguin life in 2021 and translated into Italian (Corbaccio Editori) French (Edition Marabou) and German (Doerlemann Verlag).
Dina Asfour
Cultural Embroiderer, founder of Tatreez Collective
Dina Asfourgrew in Spain with a Palestinian refugee dad and a Spanish mum, who has been always very committed to the Palestinian cause. She moved to London in 2016 where she found herself in a diverse environment that gave her the opportunity to explore and share her identity with others through the art of Tatreez. At the Tatreez Collective, we are committed to documenting the cultural heritage of Palestine through the art of Palestinian embroidery. The word ‘tatreez’ is Arabic for embroidery, and while the term is used to refer to embroider more broadly, in the Palestinian context it is understood to refer to cross-stitch. We view our practice as a way to document and promote Palestinian heritage, as well as an act of resistance. As a collective, we are made up of three diasporic women of Middle Eastern heritage ultimately united by a love of Tatreez.
Allan Brown
Textile Artist & Designer
Allan Brown Allan (Hedgerow Couture) is a textile artist from Brighton, East Sussex in the UK. Working primarily with sustainable natural fibres like nettles, flax, hemp and wool Allan takes these raw materials and transforms them into beautiful cloth with the aim of creating functional, durable clothing that draws lightly from the land, reflecting the fibres and colours of the landscape he lives and works in. Allan’s most recent project is nettle dress, which he spends seven years making a dress by hand just from the fibre of locally foraged stinging nettles. This is ‘hedgerow couture’, the greenest of slow fashion and also his medicine. it's how he survives the death of his wife and finds a beautiful way to honour her, a modern-day fairytale and hymn to the healing power of nature and slow craft.
Suzanne Lee
Designing With Biology
Suzanne is a designer turned pioneer of biotechnology for fashion. She started growing materials from microbes for the fashion industry in 2002 coining the term ‘Biocouture™’. Today Suzanne is the founder of Biofabricate, a global network serving the needs of biomaterial innovators, consumer brands and investors through events, advisory, and learning resources. Biofabricate is ‘Where Design meets Biology’. Suzanne is the author of ‘Fashioning the Future: tomorrow’s wardrobe’. She is a special advisor to Parley For The Oceans, The Mills Fabrica and Fashion for Good on biomaterials, a TED Senior Fellow, and a Launch Material Innovator - an initiative of NASA, Nike, USAID and the US State Department. Formerly Suzanne was the Chief Creative Officer of Modern Meadow, a biomaterials startup in New York (2014-2019).
www.biofabricate.co ted.com/talks/suzanne_biofabrication ted.com/talks/suzanne_lee_grow_your_own_clothes
Li Edelkoort
Co-Founder World Hope Forum
One of the world’s most renowned trend forecasters and colorists, Li is an intuitive thinker who constantly tracks how socio-cultural trends evolve. She is also a publisher, humanitarian, educator and exhibition curator. From 2015 to 2020 she was the Dean of Hybrid Studies at Parsons and she also founded New York Textile Month each September. She wrote the Anti_Fashion Manifesto in 2014 and is the co-author of A Labour of Love (Lecturis, 2020), presenting the work of a very new generation of conscious designers and makers. Her most recent endeavor is the World Hope Forum, dedicated to spreading hope across the globe through design in a post-pandemic landscape.
Philip Fimmano
Co-Founder World Hope Forum
A trend analyst, design curator and writer, contributing to Trend Union’s forecasting books, magazines and strategic studies for international companies in fashion, interiors and lifestyle. Fimmano along with his partner Lidewij Edelkoort, has co-created exhibitions for museums and institutions around the world, including Tokyo's 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, Design Museum Holon and the Gaîté Lyrique in Paris. In 2011, he co-founded Talking Textiles; an ongoing initiative to promote awareness and innovation in textiles through touring exhibitions, a trend publication, a design prize and free educational programmes – including New York Textile Month, a citywide festival celebrating textile creativity each September. Fimmano teaches a forecasting masters at Polimoda in Florence and is on the board of directors for the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe.